World War 11and the
War Guilt Question
KURT GLASER
As
the case in most other
countries, historiography in the United
States is dominated by a historical orthodoxy, the tendency if not the function of
which is to defend the foreign policy of the
past and to support that of the present. It
is important for political science to understand the historical orthodoxy of a nation,
since history provides the conceptual
framework in which current foreign policy
is shaped.
Historical orthodoxy in America is both
the expression and the supporting ideology
of a political attitude characterized as
“lega1ism-mora1ism’’ by the perspicacious
analyst George F. Kennan. This attitude
was most clearly manifested in the political
ethics of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D.
Roosevelt, as well as in the “non-recognition doctrine” of Secretary of State Stimson. The essence of legalism-moralism lies
in the attempt to apply to the international
politics of sovereign states the same principles of law and morality that individual
members of civilized communities observe
in their interpersonal relations.
The classical orthodox account of the
outbreak of World War I is Professor
Bernadotte Schmitt’s The Coming of the
War, 1914.l Since the Allies understood
IS DOUBTLESS
better than the Central Powers how to
camouflage their goals of power politics behind a democratic ideology, Schmitt-who
accepted Allied “idealism” at face valueconfirmed for the most part the verdict of
the Versailles Treaty. This orthodox perspective is shared by America’s best known
diplomatic historians, Samuel F. Bemis,
Thomas A. Bailey, and Dexter Perkins.
Confronting the orthodox school, the intellectual lights of which are too numerous
to mention here, are the so-called revisionists, among whom Charles A. Beard enjoyed the greatest prominence. Beard’s successor as elder statesman of this group was
the late Harry Elmer Barnes, who led the
way for Charles Callan Tansill and Sidney
B. Fay. Revisionists prominent since World
War I1 have included William Henry
Chamberlin, George Morgenstern, Freda
Utley, and, in a more popular vein, John
T. Flynn, Austin J. App, and Edward L.
Delaney.
The ideological roots of legalism-moralism reach back into the first half of the
nineteenth century. The American people
were at that time preoccupied with the expansion of commerce and industry and
with the realization of “Manifest Destiny”
-that is, with the conquest and exploita-
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tion of a continental Lebensraum. Alongside these practical concerns, however,
there arose a utopian idealism, the alienated character of which was noticed by
the French observer de Tocqueville, and
which culminated in the messianic conviction that the American Union was the
model for the future federation of mankind. Ignorant of the problems of other
regions but deeply impressed by the flamboyant exploits of democratic heroes such
as Bolivar, Mazzini, Kossuth, and Garibaldi, American idealists assumed uncritically the identity of national liberation
struggles with their own revolutionary
tradition. No consideration was given the
certainty that the uninhibited quest for national statehood by minor, minuscule, interlocking and overlapping European nations
would lead to a series of bitter wars and to
majority tyranny between these wars.
With the Monroe Doctrine, the United
States assumed an anti-imperialist position.
As the historian Hans Kohn has observed,
however, American politicians defined imperialism as overseas expansion-a
category that specifically excluded the continental expansion of their own ‘‘Manifest
De~tiny.”~
When the United States pushed
beyond its own maritime boundaries by annexing Samoa, Hawaii, and the former
Spanish possessions, a vehement quarrel
arose between opponents of expansion,
among whom the Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan and the Professor W.
G. Sumner of Yale were to be found, and
the “imperialist” faction led by Senator
Albert J. Beveridge. The disagreement was
resolved by a compromise that reconciled
idealist conceptions with practical interests :
the United States retained its new possessions and secured the Panama Canal Zone
unto the bargain, but embraced the principle of systematic disapproval of the imperialist adventures of other powers. This
principle was applied to the encroachments
of other powers against Chinese sovereignty
in the “Open Door” policy introduced by
Secretary of State John Hay. As Kennan
observes, this policy, which was never
backed with enough military force to make
it effective, stemmed from an incorrect
evaluation of the situation in China and
contributed greatly to arousing the Japanese to eventual war against the United
States.s
Legalism-moralism assumed concrete
form as a principle of foreign policy after
the outbreak of World War I. American
history books show little agreement as to
why the United States entered the war.
Some authors claim that the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 was the deciding
factor; others agree with Walter Lippmann
that the U-Boats merely provided a convenient pretest, and that the real reason lay
in the fear (which Lippmann and most
academic historians find justified) that the
power constellation after a victory of the
Central Powers might be dangerous for the
United States.
The historiography of the 1920’s and
1930’s was dominated by revisionism,
which annihilated whatever factual basis
the war-guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty
had seemed to possess. The most important
American revisionist studies of European
diplomacy were Harry Elmer Barnes’ pioneer boak, Genesis of the World War
(1926) and the more exhaustive twovolume study by Sidney Fay, The Origins
of the World War (1928). Barnes considers the Russian diplomats Izvolski and
Sazonov and the French politicians PoincarC, Viviani, and the Cambons the principal perpetrators of the war, and assigns a
somewhat lesser responsibility to Grey and
Berchtold. Fay, on the other hand, distributes the burden of war guilt more
equally between the two sides, but with
emphasis on Allied responsibility. Fay was
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the first to document the complicity of the
Belgrade government in the murder of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Space does not
permit a more detailed survey of revisionist
writings between the wars.
At this point, however, an important fact
must be registered. The opponents and the
supporters of American entry into World
War I proceeded for the most part from the
same legalist-moralist premises that had become traditional in our foreign-policy
thinking. The ethical considerations that
led William Jennings Bryan to resign as
Secretary of State rather than sign the
second Lusitunia note, which he judged a
step toward war, were the same that motivated President Wilson to insist that the
note be dispatched. This common legalismmoralism was inherited by both orthodox
and reviswnist historians. Since under
legalist-moralist rules the aggressor in war
is automatically wrong (the sinking of the
fi!fainehaving served as “aggression” in the
war with Spain), American revisionists
simply reversed the sign on an existing
equation to the extent that they shifted the
“guilt” for World War I to the Allies or
distributed it symmetrically. By establishing that Germany and Austria were not
solely or not even primarily responsible for
starting the war, they proved to their own
satisfaction that the United States should
have stayed out of the war, even at the cost
of victory by the Central Powers. The
sensational findings of the Nye munitions
investigation compounded the impression
spread by books such as Walter Millis’
Road to War (1935) that America had
been maneuvered into war by selfish Europeans. Public clamor arose for a law that
would banish forever the danger of involvement in foreign wars.
The specific result of American revisionism was thus the neutrality legislation of
the late 1930’s--legislation which temporarily paralyzed American foreign policy,
particularly with regard to the Spanish
Civil War. Neither the orthodox nor the revisionist historians had really faced, let
alone analyzed, the basic question of national interests. The American people therefore remained incapable of producing a
workable foreign policy for their encounter
with the rival totalitarian systems of National Socialism and Communism.
Whatever judgment is passed on the
causes of American entry into the First
World War, the sources now available
make one thing manifestly clear: that a
majority of the American people found itself in war without at first knowing why,
and in any case without awareness of a
clearly defined national interest. Two weeks
after the declaration of war, the British
propaganda headquarters at Wellington
House reported a disappointing lack of enthusiasm on the part of the American press
and public.“ The way into the war had to
be justified ex post facto, a task to which
President Wilson and his energetic propaganda director George Creel addressed
themselves.
As a reformer in the Puritan tradition,
Wilson rejected any justification of belligerency on the basis of national interest as
“Machiavellian” and therefore incompatible with the American conscience. The
justification thus had to be drawn from the
war itself, a psychological process that Kennan describes as follows:
A democracy is peace-loving. It does
not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to
provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp
the sword, it does not easily forgive its
adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then
becomes itself the issue. Democracy
fights in anger-it
fights for the very
reason that it was forced to go to war.
It fights to punish the power that was
rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it-to teach that power a lesson
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it will not forget, to prevent the thing
from happening again. Such a war must
be carried to the bitter end.
. . . a line of thought grew up, under
Wilson’s leadership, which provided
both rationale and objective for our part
in fighting the war to the bitter end.
Germany was militaristic and antidemocratic. The Allies were fighting to make
the world safe for democracy. Prussian
militarism had to be destroyed to make
way for the sort of peace we wanted.
This peace would not be based on the
old balance of power. Who, as Wilson
said, could guarantee equilibrium under
such a system? It would be based this
time on a “community of power,” on
6C
an organized common peace,” on a
League of Nations which would mobilize
the conscience and power of mankind
against aggression. Autocratic government would be done away with. Peoples
would themselves choose the sovereignty
under which they wished to reside. Poland would achieve her independence,
as would likewise the restless peoples of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There
would be open diplomacy this time;
peoples, not governments, would run
things. Armaments would be reduced
by mutual agreement. The peace would
be just and s e c ~ r e . ~
Wilson’s idealistic war ideology proved
very convenient for the Allied statesmen.
Their use-and
in the opinion of many
misuse-of it has been documented in detail by the late Wenzel Jaksch, a Social
Democratic leader in the Czechoslovak and
later in the West German parliament. As
Jaksch points out in his study of wartime
politics, the Allies in World War I suffered
an embarrassing lack of plausible war
aims? Masaryk, for instance, summarized
a conversation with Briand in February
1916 as follows:
It is no exaggeration to say that our
policy of resolving Austria into her
constituent parts gave the Allies a posi-
tive aim. They began to understand that
it would not be enough to overthrow the
Central Powers and to penalize them
financially and otherwise, but that Eastern Europe and Europe as a whole must
be reorganized.?
The following winter Wilson’s peace offensive, aborted by the President’s own
lack of persistence, caused Doctor Benes to
fear a “premature end of the war”-which
in his opinion would have frustrated Czech
national aims. “Morally,” he admitted,
“this was a painful situation.” Democratic
war ideology, which took off from legalistmoralist premises to transform a power
struggle between fundamentally similar
states of the same cultural community into
a crusade against supposed international
criminals, provided a “moral justification”
for goals of power politics which never
could have been justified on their own
merits. That only those peoples with the
acumen to shift to the victorious side at the
proper moment would enjoy the self-determination so glorified by Wilson was an
inevitable result to the crusade psychology
of the war.
In Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to accept “the
responsibility of Germany and her allies for
causing all the loss and damage to which
the Allied and Associated Governments and
their nationals have been subjected as a
consequence of the war imposed upon them
by the aggression of Germany and her
allies.” A few years after the war, Lord
Grey admitted to the historian G. P. Gooch,
“It was a very bad mistake to attribute the
whole responsibility for the war to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Versailles.
. .yy8 The opinion that finally prevailed was
that the notorious war-guilt clause constituted a superfluous and annoying appendage to the treaty, and that the Allies
in their own interest would have done
better to dispense with it. In reality, how-
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ever, article 231 was the ideological core
of the Peace of Paris.
Had the standards of international morality under which World War I was fought
still prevailed during the 1930s, a second
war launched by Germany-let us say by
a non-totalitarian Germany in order to set
aside the special problem of National Socialism-for the purpose of treaty revision
would have been considered a just war or
at least a tolerable war, inasmuch as the
Versailles Treaty, resting squarely on the
war-guilt clause, was by then generally recognized as a falsified verdict. In the meantime, however, American legalism-moralism, reinforced by a new international
legalism-moralism with its seat in the
League of Nations, had staked itself a
higher goal: to change the rules of intemational politics through a categorical prohibition of war, which was proclaimed to
the world in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of
August 27, 1928. This pact is of historical
importance, not because it ever prevented
a war, but because it provided the juridical
basis €or convicting the so-called war
criminals-in
reality for convicting Germany-in
the Allied trials at Nuremberg
at the close of World War IT.
Article I of the Kellogg-Briand Pact
reads:
The High Contracting Parties solemnly
declare in the names of their respective
peoples that they condemn recourse to
war for the solution of international
controversies and renounce it as an instrument of nationaI policy in their relations with one another.
Almost all states in the world, including the
German Reich and the Soviet Union, adhered to the pact, which the public greeted
with groundless optimism, especially in the
United States, but which diplomats tended
to regard as a pious wish rather than a
valid legal norm. The principle of the
Kellogg-Briand Pact also forms the basis
of Article 11, paragraph 4, of the Charter
of the United Nations, which reads:
All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or
use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of m y
state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United
Nations.
The prohibition of war contained in the
Kellogg-Briand Pact and repeated in Article 11, paragraph 4 of the United Nations
Charter constituted the legal basis for the
Nuremberg trial. The organizers of the International Military Tribunal were fully
aware that the practical application of this
legal thesis was an innovation. In a commentary to the charter of the court, the
American chief prosecutor, Justice Jackson,
explained that the “crime against peace”
consisted in starting a war, not in causing
it. “We must make clear to the Germans,”
he said, “that the wrong €or which their
fallen leaders are on trial is not that they
lost the war, but that they started it. And
we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of war, for our position is that no grievances or policies wiU
justify resort to aggressive
The proposition, however, that aggressive war is forbidden by a truly valid principle of international public or criminal
law-in the form of the League of Nations
Covenant, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the
Charter of the United Nations-such
as
would find application in trials lacking the
political motivation of Nuremberg, is open
to the greatest doubt. The Kellogg-Briand
Pact was ratified by most of its signatories
with reservations going far beyond the
right of self-defense specified in the letter
circulating the treaty. In addition to wars
of national defense and in execution of
sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, major powers exempted wars for the
defense of specific regions and vital na-
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tional interests as well as those in fulfillment of treaty obligations from the scope
of the pact. As Professor Edwin M. Borchard, who held the chair of international
law at Yale, declared in a lecture at the
time of ratification, the reservations expressly stated were so numerous and comprehensive as to sanctwn almost every conceivable war in advance. France, in particular, reserved the right to take military
action against Germany should the latter
concentrate troops in the Rhineland in violation of the Locarno Pact.
In contrast to the Locarno treaties, the
specific provisions of which represented a
true extension of international law, the
Kellogg-Briand Pact was, in the words of
the diplomatic correspondent Sisley Huddleston, who witnessed its signature, “not
worth the paper on which it was written.”
Anticipating the possibility that aggressive
war might be justified against a concentration-camp regime, Professor Wesley L.
Gould of Purdue University observes that :
Definition of the term “aggression” becomes a problem of placing the law in
support of justice before placing force
in support of law. If this is not done,
then international law, at least in its
treatment of war, would be of as much
value as municipal law that gave a
cornered criminal a license to kill with
impunity if a policeman fired the first
shot.1°
l
The most interesting point of view is that
of the former Vienna Professor Hans Kelsen (most recently at the University of
California in Berkeley), who regards the
war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty as
a specific application of the doctrine of
bellum justum, which permits war as a reaction against a violation of international
law. Kelsen describes the legal effect of the
Kellogg Pact as follows:
The Kellogg Pact forbids war, but
only as an instrument of national policy.
This is a very important qualification
of the prohibition. A reasonable interpretation of the Kellogg Pact, one not
attempting to make of it a useless and
futile instrument, is that war is not forbidden as a means of international poliCY, especially not as a reaction against
a violation of international law, is an
instrument for the maintenance and
realization of international law. This is
exactly the idea of the bellum justum
theory?‘
Kelsen’s reasoning that the bellum
justum theory forms the basis of the Treaty
of Versailles, especially of Article 231
which provides the rationale for its various
punitive provisions, opens the way to the
following conclusions : the legal validity of
a unilaterally imposed punitive treaty, such
as that of Versailles, depends upon the
qualification of the war that has been
fought as a bellum justum and of the treaty
as punishment of an offense against international law. If, however, this condition is
removed through the process of historical
revision, as happened in the case of World
War I, the war then turns out to be a
bellum injustum insofar as it went beyond
restoring the situation that had existed before the war. The punishment imposed by
the victors is then likewise revealed as a
violation of international law, the correction of which is an international concern
dictated by justice and not mere national
interest. Once efforts to secure peaceful revision have definitely failed, a war to
change a treaty violative of international
law may be considered a bellum justum, according to Kelsen’s construction of the
Kellogg-Briand Pact.
Since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, but more particularly since the outbreak of World War I, American foreign
policy has moved within the framework of
a doctrine of bellum justum, which is explained lucidly by Professor Robert W.
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Tucker in a short book entitled The Just
War (1960) .I2 According to this American
doctrine, the moral character of belligerency as good or evil is determined, not by
the deeper causes of the war and even less
by the issues in dispute, but solely by the
circumstances under which hostilities are
opened. Whichever state first invokes military force in pursuit of its national interests becomes ipso facto the agressor, whom
“international justice” demands to be not
only defeated but also punished.
This form of the “just war” doctrine is,
however, political rather than legal in
nature. It is only employed when it happens
to coincide with the political policy of the
time. (Its nonapplication to Vietnam is
notorious: if punishment were a necessary
instrument of international politics, then
the Hanoi government and the Russians
and Chinese who incite its aggressions
would certainly be targets.) When the
doctrine is invoked, the language is always
that of unsullied rectitude, as in the opening speech of chiel‘ prosecutor Jackson at
Nuremberg :
Our position is that whatever grievances
a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive
warfare is an illegal means for settling
those grievances or for altering those
conditions.
A defensive war in the strict sense must
be limited to those measures needed to repel the attack and to restore the status quo
ante bellurn. Since, however, the American
doctrine of “just war” demands punishment
of the aggressor, it sanctions total warfare
aiming for unconditional surrender and not
shrinking from the use of mass-destruction
weapons. It furthermore permits the victor
who has defeated aggression to exploit the
fortunes of war in order to obtain political
and territorial gains that would otherwise
be forbidden objects of military campaigns.
After both world wars, American adminis-
trations were not opposed to territorial
changes at Germany’s expense; the question was only “how large?”
Our present contest does not include
analysis of the reasons that moved President Roosevelt to lead, or if one prefers
maneuver the United States into World
War 11. Suffice it to say that the fashionable L‘legalism-moralism,y’of which Roosevelt himself was a prominent representative, forbade the justification of war policies with arguments of supposed national
interest. To move from the “semi-war” of
Lend-Lease to a full state of war, it was
necessary that the United States be attacked. “The question was,” Secretary of
War Stimson wrote in his diary after a
cabinet meeting on November 25, 1941,
“how we could maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without too
much danger to o ~ r s e ~ v e sSince
. ~ ~ ~the
~
Japanese fulfilled Stimson’s (and evidently
Roosevelt’s) wish on December 7, 1941, the
Administration was able to lead the nation
into war without qualms of conscience and
with the full support of a united though
badly deceived American people.
American World War I1 revisionism has
dealt mainly with the chain of events that
led to Pearl Harbor and only incidentally
with the outbreak of the European war. In
Europe, serious revisionism has been
limited to the Munich crisis and certain
aspects of Allied strategy during the war;
the politics and diplomacy of the GermanPolish dispute of 1939 have been left
largely untouched. The court historians of
America, who are inclined to hold Poland
and Britain blameless in the affair, are supported by a West German school of historical orthodoxy, the philosophy of which can
be summed up in a sentence widely quoted
in popular books and newspapers: “Whoever casts doubt upon the exclusive guilt
of Germany for World War II thereby destroys the foundation of postwar politic^."^^
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Few academicians on either side of the Atlantic have been disposed to question what
the orthodox Professor Walther Hofer calls
“Nuremberg historiography” (das Geaxiom
schichtsbild won Niirnberg) -the
that the “catastrophic personality” of Adolf
Hitler, his totalitarian rule, and his territorial expansionism constituted the single
decisive cause of World War II.16
The possibility that respectable historians might challenge the Nuremberg thesis
was indicated when the British historian
A. J. P. Taylor produced a slim volume entitled Origins of the Second World War
(1961), the main contention of which was
that neither Hitler nor the British cabinet
really wanted war, which nevertheless
broke out as the result of inept diplomacy.17 Yet no German historian of repute
has come iorth with a revisionist book
about 1939, despite the fact that such a
book would have an instant market since
it would fulfill two wishes: that of Germans generally for an acquittal of their
country, and that of former National
Socialist functionaries for an exoneration
of Adolf Hitler and thus of their own past.
An extensive study of the published
diplomatic documents (and some unpublished documents) and considerable secondary literature having to do with the 1939
crisis-the details of which are too voluminous to report here-has
convinced this
writer of the correctness of a number of
theses that can be classified as revisionist,
since they conflict with “Nuremberg historiography.” These theses, which are in
each case supported by the pertinent documentation, may be summarized as follows:
1. Hitler and Ribbentrop complained repeatedly to the Polish foreign minister,
Colonel Beck, and his Berlin ambassador
Lipski indicating that Germany regarded
the situation in Danzig and that of the
Germans in Poland as intolerable. They
proposed various compromises for the set-
tlement of German-Polish differences. The
acceptability of these proposals is of course
a matter of opinion.
2. Against the advice of his colleagues,
Colonel Beck rejected every opportunity to
reach solutions of the Danzig Corridor, and
minority questions acceptable to Germany,
although he must have known that renitent
insistence on the status quo of Versailles
would inevitably provoke the Hitler regime
to violence. During the fall and winter of
1938-39 he followed a policy of dragging
things out; after the British guarantee of
March 31, 1939, Beck refused any serious
negotiation on these controversial questions and indulged i n an openly anti-German policy.
3. Hitler made serious efforts to achieve a
settlement of German-Polish differences as
the basis for a rapprochement of the two
governments. In so doing, he insisted on the
return of Danzig to the Reich and on extraterritorial transit rights through the Corridor as the essential minimum for Germany.
Only after the British guarantee, when
Polish obduracy seemed to prove the impossibility of reaching an agreement, did
Hitler decide to destroy Poland militarily.
The documentation so far available does
not, however, prove that Hitler was still
willing to negotiate in late August 1939. It
must also be observed that Beck, particularly after March 1939, had every reason to
fear that fulfillment of Hitler’s initial demands would lead to further demands and
perhaps to the total dependency or destruction of the Polish state.
4. Aiter September 1938, the British
foreign minister, Lord Halifax, succeeded
in recapturing control of British foreign
policy from Prime Minister Chamberlain,
who had managed the British end of
Munich singlehandedly and without keeping
the cabinet fully informed. By 1938 at the
latest, Halifax reached the conviction that
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Hitler’s power system represented a direct
danger for England. His post-Munich
policy was directed at achieving a decisive
defeat of the Third Reich-through diplomatic means if possible, otherwise with
armed force.
5. To make the war morally and politically
acceptable to the British people (and, what
is more important, to the American people), Germany had to be induced to commit
aggression. For this purpose, Halifax
needed a tripwire-a role that Poland was
admirably suited to play. His diplomacy
was therefore calculated to stiffen Polish
resistance against German demands, but
with a surface tone of moderation so that
London could claim credit for appeasement
to the bitter end. Cleverly backing his
minister’s policy, the British ambassador
in Warsaw, Sir Howard W. Kennard, undermined any tendency toward Polish accommodation with Germany. Although the
British public would not have supported a
war on account of Danzig, the unconditional guarantee against German attack
worked as a pledge against German reannexation of the so-called “Free State.”
’
6. That England was interested in Poland
mainly as a trip-wire is obvious, since
geography rules out England as a base for
the effective defense of the Polish western
border. When Poland asked in June 1939
for sixty million pounds sterling to purchase war materials, Halifax responded
with a credit of only eight million pounds
restricted to purchases in England, under
which no deliveries actually took place. The
British government did not guarantee the
Polish eastern border against Soviet annexations. Churchill’s negotiations with the
Polish exile government in 1944 were
mainly devoted to persuading the Poles to
accept Stalin’s territorial demands.
Once we can make up our minds to depart from the legalist-moralist standpoint,
we will judge the war not according to who
fired the first shot, but on the basis of the
larger issues at stake. In this case, the
proof that Halifax deliberately permitted
a German-Polish war to take place with the
purpose of Franco-British intervention does
not lead automatically to the conclusion
that he thereby committed an international
crime.
Two important observations must be
made at this point:
1. the question as to the specific chain of
events that led to the outbreak of World
War I1 and the roles of the various actors
in these events is a very different question
from that concerning the nature and longrange goals of National Socialism. Each
question must be answered separately.
2. the National Socialist program of expansion must be rigorously distinguished
from genuine German national interests,
including that of treaty revision.
Since the facts of prewar diplomacy disprove the thesis of unprovoked German aggression in World War 11, Allied warfare
against Germany to the point of unconditional surrender cannot be justified as a
war of retribution-even
on legalistmoralist premises. The question remains
whether a war to overthrow the Hitler
regime was justified. Since two totalitarian
systems were fighting each other after
June 1941, the question necessarily arises
as to the extent to which warfare b y the
Germans was justified.
The moral question of World War 11-a
question we must answer again in our confrontation with Communism-is
whether
and under what circumstances war for the
elimination of a totalitarian regime is justified, as a war of aggression if need be. The
traditional doctrine of sovereignty would
suggest a negative answer, since each state
is considered entided to manage or mismanage its internal affairs. The advent of
modern totalitarianism has, however,
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broken down the barrier between domestic
and foreign policy, for the following reasons :
1. The doctrine of internal sovereignty
within the Western cultural community is
based on the assumption that governments
will adhere to the rules of civilized statesmanship, which is not the case with totalitarian regimes.
2. Human responsibility does not stop at
political boundaries. Since the contemporary technology of weapons, propaganda,
and political control favors inordinately
those who exercise state power, totalitarian
dictators in particular, the overthrow of a
totalitarian regime without outside help has
become almost unthinkable. Because human rights are universal, mankind is under
a universal obligation: the fight for freedom is the cause of all men of good will.
3. the dynamics of totalitarian systems,
which prevent the achievement of internal
political balance, propel these systems
automatically into expansionist adventures.
Communism, exactly like National Socialism, requires conflict with an external or
at least externalized enemy as an element
of internal stability.
It is obvious from these reasons that the
question of free systems versus totalitarian
systems must be included in every realistic
evaluation of contemporary history and
politics. The German annexation of Austria
in March 1938 presents values quite different from those involved in the proposed
Amchlm of German Austria with the then
constitutional Weimar Republic, which the
Allies prevented in 1919 and again in 1931.
Long before Hitler rose to power, the
Versailles peace was recognized in America
as the main cause of the expected Second
European War. Most Americans were firmly determined to remain neutral in this
war. The slogan in the early 1930’s was:
“We’ll sit this one out.”
The factor that moved America to give
Great Britain its unconditional support and
finally to take part in World War I1 was
not the German aggression against Poland,
but the brutality of the Hitler regime and
particularly its persecution of the Jews. If
a mn-totalitarian German government had
invoked military force to secure the return
of Danzig and extraterritorial transit rights
through the Corridor after the failure of
diplomatic efforts, Warsaw would have
fought alone. None of the West European
powers, and much less the United States,
would have seen its national interest served
by a second world war to prevent the overthrow of a territorial settlement already
recognized as fragile and dangerous. In this
case the German war against Poland, while
it might not have qualified as a “just war”
under pseudojuristic American doctrine,
would in any case have been a tolerated
war in political practice. While there may
remain room for dispute as to how responsibility €or the German-English and German-French war of 1939 is to be distributed, there is no doubt whatever that
the totalitarian nature of National Socialism and not German aggression provoked
the Western declarations of war.
As soon as the reality-alienated “Nuremberg historiography” is dispensed with,
World War I1 is seen, not as a fight between aggressors and victims of attack, but
as the struggle of free men against the unfreedom of totalitarian dictatorship. Only
the maintenance of human freedom and the
restoration of the threatened values of
Western culture can justify the sacrifice of
millions of human lives and the destruction
that was militarily unavoidable. (The
latter category does not include the bombing of Rotterdam, Dresden, or Hiroshima.)
Once the ideological nature of World
War I1 is recognized, the front lines necessarily appear both complex and contradictory. The conflict of constitutional and
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totalitarian systems was interlocked with
a series of simultaneous and only loosely
related national wars in such a fashion that
the armed forces of both sides were fighting both for and against freedom at various
times and places.
Large-scale war might perhaps have been
avoided by granting the German claim to
treaty revision in the East-a claim that the
constitutional government of the Weimar
Republic had also asserted in refusing to
sign an eastern Locarno. The Reich had a
justified and limited claim against Poland.
Experience with Hitler and with Communist dictatorships raises the question,
however, whether a totalitarian system is
capable of waging a national war. Insofar
as national interest, conceived in organic,
geopolitical terms, is overshadowed by the
messianic pretensions of a totalitarian
ideology, the question seems to demand a
negative answer.
The specific justification of the ideological war against Hitler’s totalitarian Reich
had the effect of determining and limiting
its morally admissible war aims. The ideological goal was the removal of Hitler and
the restoration of a stable rule of law in
continental Europe. This goal was not fulfilled but frustrated by the total liquidation of German political and military
power.
Whether the ideological struggle against
Hitler’s Germany justified an American
war against Japan is another question altogether. A national interest in such a war
did not exist; the total value of American
investments in the Far East was only a few
billion dollars, and the projected Japanese
“Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”
did not at any point overlap the area of
predominant American power. Inasmuch
as the Hitler regime avoided carefully any
colIision with the United States, however,
President Roosevelt chose the “back door”:
the provocation of Japan. The tactics
through which he incited Japan to its foolhardy attack on Pearl Harbor have been
described in detail by Tansill, Beard, Morgenstern, and W. H. Chamberlin, whose
historical thesis-that
the Roosevelt Administration deliberately sought war-has
found general if grudging acceptance. Four
days after Pearl Harbor, the Hitler regime
fulfilled Roosevelt’s wish with a declaration
of war against the United States.
In Chapter I11 of his American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, George F. Kennan shows
that the American conflict with Japan represented no true national interest, but only
the expression of a rigid legalism-moralism with little relation to political reality.
Whether the ideological interest in the defeat of Hitler, had that aim been pursued
without presenting half of Europe to Soviet
Russia, was worth the price of an unnecessary war with Japan, with its consequences
of the bolshevization of China and a series
of limited wars that pin down American
troops in Asia to this very day, is a question that need not be answered here. Insofar as Western strategy merely replaced one
dictatorship with another, equally vicious,
the American sacrifice was not worth while.
In the European theater of war, the ideological goal of overthrowing Hitler dictated
unqualified Western support of the German
resistance. This would have included the
offering of acceptable peace conditions to
a non-National Socialist German government willing to vacate the occupied territories in western and northern Europe and
to make restitution for damages caused by
the war and the occupation. The politics of
unconditional surrender frustrated this
ideological goal, undermined the antiHitler underground, and transformed the
Second World War into a senseless national war. It may well be contended that
the last nine months of the war-from July
20, 1944 to May 8, 1945-and the deaths
and destruction that took place during this
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interval, are a direct result of this perverse
policy, chargeable to Washington and London, not to Hitler and even less to the German Wehrmacht.
Through the involvement of Soviet
Russia, the European war assumed an ambivalent aspect. Stalin and his henchmen
had always been enemies of freedom and
of European culture, the material output
of which they hoped to confiscate. The German-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939 fulfilled the Communist aim of provoking war
among the capitalist powers, so that when
both sides were in a state of exhaustion, the
“second wave of world revolution” could
roll unhampered.
Under these conditions, the politics of
freedom indicated sufficient help to the
Soviet Union so that the German armies
would bog down there, but in no case
enough to permit a Communist conquest
of Europe. Few Western statesmen understood the fact that Stalin remained their
enemy through all phases of the war and,
with revolutionary weapons, waged uninterrupted war against the West?7 Stalingrad was the great turning point of the war.
After the encirclement of General Paulus
and his army and the destruction of German offensive force, the most urgent danger
for Europe was no longer that od a continuation of National Socialist rule, the days of
which were numbered, but that of a continental Communist dictatorship. A jter Stalingrad, the German army was fighting for
Europe. Had the Western powers appreciated this and planned their strategy accordingly, so as to end the war with the
eastern front as far removed as possible, the
history of the last two decades would have
been very different. In fact, however,
Allied, principally American, deliveries of
trucks, tires, weapons, airplanes, and other
war materials to the Soviet Union were
stepped up enormously in 1943 and 1944,,
while the German forces were already in
continuous retreat. The continuation of
“Lend Lease” to the U.S.S.R. to the end of
the war and to a total figure of eleven billion dollars-although the Russians had
major reserves of men and materials-gave
the Red Army the mobility it needed to advance to the center of Europe.
The saving of East-Central Europe was
totally incompatible with the policy of
(6
unconditional surrender.” A continuity
of the German state and the German military command was urgently necessary in
the interest of the West. The security of
Europe required that the Balkans, Poland,
and as much of the Baltic lands as possible
be held by German troops, while the Allies
assumed the functions of military government until national governments could be
restored. The only way to avoid the Soviet
filling of power vacuums was not to crcate
such vacuums.
The events at the end of the war, including the sovietization of East-Central Europe
and the expulsion of national and ethnic
Germans from the eastern Reich and Volksdeutsche settlements into what was left of
Germany, were a consequence, not only of
World War I1 as such, but also to a very
large degree of Allied war policy, which
guaranteed war “to the bitter end.” For the
fact that things did not turn out even worse
we can thank those elements of the Wehrmacht who took care that the Russians were
not the first to cross the Rhine.
Seen in this perspective, World War I1
does not present a black-and-white picture,
but a mosaic in diverse shades of gray.
Whatever the importance of National Socialism as one of the decisive causes of war,
it must be kept in mind that totalitarianism
is an endemic disease of modern society,
the germs of which are present in every
country and which becomes virulent in
times of national crisis. The nation that has
fallen victim to totalitarianism should be
liberated and healed, not punishcd. Even
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the most uncompromising opponent of
Communism would never think of demanding that the Russian people “expiate the sin
of Bolshevism.”
Once the concept of “war guilt” is given
a concrete and realistic meaning-responsibility for political or military measures that
did not serve freedom or were actually injurious to freedom-then it is obvious that
the answer to the “war guilt question”
must be complex. Both sides offended
against freedom and the dignity of man;
both sides forgot the strategy of prudence
and let themselves be swept to disaster by
the passions of war. The common people
of both the former Allies and the former
Axis Powers are with indistinguishable differences guilty or innocent: World War I1
brought them a common destiny that must
now be mastered. Individual crimes should
be impartially punished by due process of
whatever law existed at the time of their
commission. The German people as a
whole, however, has no reason for particular guilt feelings; it was the first victim of
National Socialism and today occupies the
front line against totalitarian Communism.
It is absurd to maintain that Germany has
a particular obligation, not shared by the
other nations of Europe, to make special
sacrifices in the liquidation of World
War 11. That war was a common catastrophe with multiple causes. If it is essential
to have a villain, that role can only be
filled by the exaggerated nationalism of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; which shattered the concert of Europe and brought forth a half century of
conflict, but is now yielding to a restored
sense of European unity.
'Bernadette E. Schmitt, The Coming of the
War, 1914 (New York: H. Fertig, 1958).
*Hans Kohn, Reflections on Colonialism, Memorandum Number Two, Foreign Policy Research
Institute, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: 1956).
‘George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 19001950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19511,
pp. 44-48.
‘Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1940), pp. 31-32.
‘Kennan, op. cit., pp. 67.
%‘emel Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam
(translated and edited by Kurt Glaser, New York:
Praeger, 19631, pp. 118-22 and 142-47.
‘Thomas G. Masaryk, The Making o f a State
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 19271, p. 103.
*Verbatim quote from G. P. Gooch, Studies in
Diplomacy and Statecraft (London: Longmans
Green, 19471, p. 107.
‘Department of State Bulletin, 1945, XII, p. 228.
“Wesley L. Gould, An Introduction to International Law (New York: Harper, 19571 p. 607.
=Hans Kelsen, General Theory o f Law and
State (New York: Russell and Russell, 19611, p.
334.
“Robert W. Tucker, The Just Ivar (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press, 19601.
“Quoted, ibid., p. 12.
“Quoted in US. Congress, Pearl Harbor Attack,
hearings of the joint committee (Washington,
1946). Volume XI, p. 5433. Richard N. Current
has undertaken to explain this entry in his article
“How Stimson Meant to ‘Maneuver’ the Japanese,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Reuiew, XL, No. 1
(June, 19531, pp. 67-74. Current contends that
Stimson anticipated a Japanese attack on British
or Dutch, rather than United States possessions.
But he also points out that Stimson told FDR of
his preference that US. bombers from the Philippines attack the Japanese naval force that had
been observed moving southward, without a declaration of war.
‘This is an incorrect but widely repeated ver.
sion of a statement by Professor Theodor Eschen.
burg, in a newspaper article reprinted in Znstitutionelle Sorgen in der Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart:
Schwab, 19611, p. 164, that recognition of the unquestioned and exclusive guilt of Hitler was “a
foundation of the politics of the Federal Republic.”
’Walther Hofer, “Entfesselung oder ‘Ausbruch’
des Zweiten Weltkrieges?, eine grundsatzliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem Buch von A. J. P. Taylor
iiber die Urspriinge des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” reprinted in: Die Vorgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges-Legende und Wirklichkeit (Zurich : Buchverlag Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 1963), p. 23.
”See George B. deHuszar, “The Success of
Kremlin Policy,” in George B. deHuszar, ed., Soviet Power and Policy (New York: Gowell, 19551,
pp. 8-14.
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